Behind the steering wheel with the engine running and the heater on, she shivered not from the cold but from a sense of possibility, of the enormity that lay ahead. She knew she would have the child of a person she had loved for just a few months. Despite her pain and sorrow, it somehow felt like exactly what she’d always wanted — for her life to change in a way she couldn’t foresee. She said a silent farewell to Tug’s family and drove off into the future, and the unknown.
TWELVE
Montreal, 2006
AS THE FALL went on, Mitch’s work life settled into a routine that was, if not exactly easy, then comfortably regimented. Group-therapy meetings took up Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; Tuesdays and Thursdays he devoted to paperwork and individual counseling. It was the one-on-one sessions that spooked him most. With just one other person in the room, the narrowness of the equation struck him as dangerous and potentially explosive: eyes either glancing away from his or boring into him with pain or anger. It was simply too intense. To cut down on these, he volunteered to take on every administrative task he could instead, from grants and project management to a review of hospital procedures. At lunchtime, he’d close the door to his office and eat a sandwich he’d brought from home while listening to sports radio. Hockey season was starting and he let the predictions and opinions wash over him, defensive pairings and forward lines, who was being called up or traded, gambling scandals, injuries. Sometimes he even took notes, picking and discarding players for his fantasy team. When people knocked and came in, they often saw him scribbling away and frowning in concentration, and he let them think he was absorbed in work.
One weekend he went to visit Malcolm in Mississauga. His brother and Cindy lived in a messy, rowdy house in the suburbs, where they managed the chaos by constantly adding to it. Three children, two cats, and a dog; video games, toy pianos, televisions. To their menagerie they had recently added a rabbit, who sat in a cage in the living room, cowering inside an empty tissue box, though the children kept trying to tempt it out with carrots and celery and once, in an unattended moment, a hamburger.
“I know you like hamburgers, but Snowball doesn’t,” Cindy explained soothingly to her sobbing daughter after throwing the meat away. “It’s just not his thing.”
Malcolm was laughing. “Snowball was at school,” he told Mitch, “but he’s allergic to the fluorescent lights in the classroom or something. So we’re foster-parenting him, I suppose. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.”
From a skinny, spastic boy Malcolm had grown into a round-bellied, amiable, balding man with a moustache and a constant smile. Being around him relaxed Mitch when nothing else would. On his visits to the house he felt like just one more happy addition, inconspicuous but loved, with little demanded of him, much like the rabbit. It didn’t matter that he slept on the couch or, when he woke up in the morning with a burning sensation in his leg, found a Transformer action figure wedged under his thigh, or that Emily, the youngest, threw up on him in the backyard after a game of tag they were all playing got a little too rough. The children beat up on him, included him in their games, and left him alone when he said he was tired. The place was dirty and hectic and he could disappear into it, losing track even of himself, like he couldn’t anywhere else.
He didn’t know how Malcolm had managed to become such a good father without having a model for it, nor did he know how he and Cindy still managed to laugh at each other’s jokes and argue cheerfully about whose turn it was to cook or do the dishes. Malcolm wasn’t an especially successful engineer; he had made it to a certain level and hadn’t been promoted further in years. He wasn’t a particularly good cook, either, or hilarious or even all that hardworking. Cindy complained that he was disorganized, useless at home repairs, and not very good with money. He wasn’t good about asking Mitch questions about how things were going. His sole talent, one he’d had since childhood, was the best imaginable, and it had surrounded him his entire life, flexible, capacious, grown to embrace his wife, their family, their house, and, when he was around, even his brother. He had the gift of being happy.
It was always a shock for Mitch, after leaving those crowded confines, to find himself back in his quiet apartment in Westmount. He could hear his downstairs neighbors, a gay couple, entertaining a group of friends to gales of laughter.
The future he was looking at was without color, without noise. Hopelessly quiet. He spent the night awake, unable to shut out the silence that had taken over his life.
And so he was alone. To combat this solitude he had but few weapons: his job, his routine, and, increasingly, Grace and Sarah. October became November and he continued to help them as best he could. Grace’s cast had been removed and she was walking again, though she still winced at times and there was a stiffness in her movements, in the hunch of her shoulders, that made her look older than she was. Four days a week she went to rehab and returned home exhausted, close to tears, even though, as she told Mitch, most of the time she was lying down while the trainer pushed her legs in one direction and then another, working on her mobility. “You wouldn’t think it would hurt so much, but it does,” she said. “By the end of it I want to throttle this poor nice woman who’s just trying to help me. It’s like when Sarah was born and I told the doctors I hated them.”
“You hated the doctors? Why?” Sarah called. She was in the other room but had the smart child’s habit of listening closely at inconvenient times.
Grace grimaced. “I didn’t really hate them,” she said. “I just thought I did.”
Sarah came into the kitchen, where Grace and Mitch were sitting at the table, with a drawing dangling from her hand. Her forehead was creased with concern. “Because it hurt when I was born?”
“It hurt a little at first,” Grace said carefully, “but then it didn’t. And then you came out, and I was so happy.” She drew her close and wrapped her in a hug. Sarah buckled her arms around her mother’s waist, squeezing hard, and Mitch saw Grace clench her teeth in pain. She kissed Sarah’s head and said, “Now go back to your drawing. Don’t you have homework to do?”
“I finished it,” Sarah said, and left the kitchen, her troubles apparently forgotten.
Mitch brought Grace a glass of water and a couple of Tylenols, knowing her well enough to tell when she needed some. There was an extra weariness to her face, as if her head weighed too much for her neck, and her eyes grew blurry and vague.
“Thank you,” she said.
Mitch had stopped coming around as much, since now she could do almost everything herself. But he continued to run a few errands, adding their usual weekly groceries to his, stopping by to change lightbulbs, take out the trash, fix the shower rod, things she wasn’t up to yet. He had grown used to the shape and purpose these activities gave to his days, and he looked forward to Sarah’s happy greeting and his chats with Grace. By this point he wasn’t sure if he was helping or being helped, or whether the distinction even mattered. He and Grace were casual together, having slipped into a practical, easygoing friendship. Eventually she wouldn’t need his assistance at all, and he didn’t know if they would continue to be part of each other’s lives.
One day, Azra was coming up the steps as he was leaving the apartment. He had last seen her in mid-September, back when Grace was utterly prone.